Books - 2012
Books I Have Read In 2012
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Technically I read this half in 2011 and half in 2012 but I’m counting it here anyway. I found it slow going at first, but towards the end started enjoying it a lot more. The ending was a shade guessable but that doesn’t detract from an evocatively written depiction of the character of Dorian Gray and period London. This was the first book I have read on my new Kindle
God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
A friend recommended this book to me a while ago but I didn’t buy it at the time as it looked like it would be just another anti-religious book similar to Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which I hadn’t especially enjoyed reading. As luck would have it, however, I saw it on sale for 99p in Amazon’s recent Kindle sale, so decided to give it a go. And I’m very pleased I did. I found it a well written and well-researched book. It is anti-religion, as you’d expect from the title but makes its case very clearly and although it criticises religion (all of the main ones) very harshly it didn’t do it with the tone of ridicule that I felt I detected in Dawkins’ book. I also felt that this book contained much more information than presented by Dawkins.
120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
Deeply unpleasant read and a slog to finish. I wish I hadn’t bothered. It started bad and got worse. The book probably does have a message but you’d be better off reading a few amazon reviews to find it, rather than read the book itself.
Genus
Not sure what I made of this book. I enjoyed reading it and wanted to find out more, but the big events in the book seemed to remain largely unexplained. I also thought the writing style seemed to veer disjointedly for no apparent reason. For example, I loved the bullfight set-piece but it seemed out of place in the story. The book does paint a convincing vision of a near-future London but the rioting and September 11th parallels seemed very heavy handed.
Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice by Olivier Bonaventure
This is a free university textbook from www.saylor.org. As such, it isn’t light reading, but it was exactly what I was looking for to teach myself about computer networking - an optional course I missed out on whilst at university. It contains huge amounts of detail about pretty much everything you’ll ever need to know about how information makes it from your computer to the other side of the planet and back.
Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers
Another book worth about what I paid for it. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Actually this one’s OK, but is definitely correctly named. I’ve enjoyed the stories on Tucker’s website as a kind of guilty pleasure. This book contains duplicates of some of them, plus more that presumably didn’t even make the cut as website give-aways.
Understanding Exposure, 3rd Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera
I got a lot out of this book. It really helped me to get my head around some basic photography concepts and how to implement them. It contains lots of great photos, too.
A Song of Ice and Fire (1) - A Game of Thrones: Book 1 of a Song of Ice and Fire
It took me a while to finish this 800+ page mammoth book and took me a little while to get into but by the end I was thoroughly enjoying it. I found the supernatural element strange as, although it was present in the book it featured so minimally it was hard to tell whether or not it was even meant to be there, or not. However, I enjoyed the political intrigue and the occasional grizzly (and very original) death!
Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them
A look behind the scenes at the development of some well known iPhone and iPad games. An interesting read, although the impression I got of the App Store as being a bit of a jungle was somewhat disheartening. Quite a few of the featured apps failed to break even and success seemed to often be related to whether or not Apple had chosen to feature the app on their store front page.